Q&A Day

Q. Matt, is it true you’re twittering? Please say its not!
A. Yes, it’s true. So when I start putting @ signs in front of everything and typing RT (which really means I have nothing new to say so I’m taking what some one else has said instead) don’t be surprised. I don’t know why yet, and frankly, I still don’t fully know all the “how” behind it either. I haven’t settled into what I’m going to twitter about yet, but if you want to follow me go to twitter.com/mattkloskowski. It should at least be interesting to see what develops from it and I’m open to twitter ideas. Thanks @MattKloskowski (I feel so trendy now!).

Q. How do you zoom in and out of your photos quickly like you did in your video?
A. By pressing Cmd/Ctrl + or – (minus). If you look up near the Navigator Panel on the top left side of Lightroom you’ll see Fit, Fill, 1:1 and something else. Cmd + will zoom in to each of these levels each time you press it. Throw the minus key in there to zoom back out.

Q. In your Before/After video the other day the file you edited and returned from Photoshop was a TIFF file. Any reason you use a TIFF and not PSD?
A. Nope. I prefer PSD actually. I got a new computer and forgot to set my preferences back to PSD. Just go to your Lightroom preferences, choose the External Editing tab, and select PSD as File Format.

Q. The Before/After videos you did go into Photoshop with that Smart Object “thing”. Will that work with Photoshop Elements?
A. No, Elements doesn’t really have smart objects the same way that the full version of Photoshop does. You’d basically have to go Edit in Elements once. Then go back to Lightroom and make your changes and Edit in Elements again. Then combine the two layers into one document. Sounds like a good idea for a tutorial so I’ll be sure to whip one up soon.

Q. Matt, will you be with Scott at any of his Lightroom tours this month?
A. Unfortunately no. I don’t like traveling with Scott. He’s got these weird quirks like he can only sit in even numbered rows on the plane and seats with the letter C. He insists his water be chilled to 72 degrees F at restaurants and things like that
I’m totally just kidding by the way. We have a great time traveling together but I won’t be there. However, I will be teaching the same Lightroom tour in Chicago on July 20 and New York City on July 22. Check out Kelbytraininglive.com for more info.

Q. Matt, any tips on making a quick selection when the subject is not so contrasty against the background?
A. Hey, this is a Lightroom Q&A but I’ll answer it anyway because I get this question a lot Basically, over the years I’ve found that folks want a magic way to make a complex selection. There is none. Prepare to spend some time if you’ve got a complex selection to make and the area you want selected doesn’t have a lot of contrast from the background. Now there are things to help with this (Quick Mask, Channels, etc…) but you’re still going to spend some time on it and it ain’t fun time either. There’s third party plug-ins which help, but they still take time and require lots of input from you. Some training to help out on the topic:
– Scott Kelby’s Channels Book (Channels haven’t changed one bit in years so it’s still relavant)
– Katrin Eismann’s Masking and Compositing book
– Dave Cross’ Photoshop Selections DVD over at Kelbytraining.com

Matt is the Vice President of Photography for onOne Software and a Tampa-based photographer. He's a best selling author of over 20 books and teaches Lightroom and Photoshop at seminars and conferences around the world.

19 Comments

Darrin

November 4, 2009

When you find out….please let me know Sarah…My issue is that Lightroom simply does not see file creation or modified dates….and in fact, cs3 and Expressions media both identify the accurate date without problem….

Q:
I have a technical question maybe one you could help me with. I am using Lightroom on Mac. And my problem is that Lightroom changes both the creation and modification date of the file (the date when the file was built and the date when you modified the file) when I export them from a RAW file to a Jpeg or TIFF.

I really need for this not to happen since clients need to instantly see the creation date and time for their own file management reasons. Basically, I need to see when the photo was taken in the finder window. I could care less about when it was exported. Any suggestions? I am really pulling my hair out over this one.

How do we post to your Q&A? I can’t find a link or e-mail address. I have a question: With LR I REALLY love the filters where I can filter by camera, lens, ap, ss. But I’d REALLY like a filter by FOCAL LENGTH. Is there such a way to do this, or should I post a feature request to Adobe?

Today I got my Wacom Bamboo. Works great. But: is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom also ready for it? In fact that’s the photo development tool I use more than CS4.
I experience two problems there. In my opion it’s not pressure sensitive and the normal mouse click voor zoom in works, but zoom out (zoom to fit) doesn’t work.

Hi Matt,
I got a question for you. I am an assistant for a commercial and advertising photographer. He used to work with iview media pro and always copied his pictures (jpg+raw) onto a laptop during the shoot, made a quick selecting with the client (tagged the preview jpgs with colours) and after the shoot went back in the program and re-tagged the raw files.
He recently switched to lightroom and really wants a solution for the re-tagging problem, but doesnt want to shoot only raw, because a lot of his client want the jpg previews right after the shoot. So I imported raws and jpgs seperately (as two files) into lightroom and stacked them by time. by doing this I was able to have stacks with the jpg on top of the raw. thus I was able to tagg the jpgs and have the selected raws in the stack. The only problem, I still couldnīt solve the re-tagging problem. Is there any way how I can keep JPGs and Raw as seperate files and still tagg both of the files at the same time?

Matt-just getting up to speed with LR2 and have 3 questions:
-you indicate you leave JPEGs as separate photos during import. I shoot in RAW/JPEG(basic) presently but don’t see why JPEGs are needed in LR2 and am considering just shooting in RAW.
-if I backup to a second EHD during import, is that second EHD linked to LR2 automatically? If not, in case EHD #1 corrupts, how do I link to the backup EHD…just via the regular find files process?
-if converting to DNG, recommendations from Scott Kelby are different from yours, specifically, he says he deletes the RAW file since it is included in the DNG file. Is that true, or only true if you check the box for that in the preferences dropdown? In general, I see no reason to keep the RAW file if I am converting to DNG.
Thanks for your response.

Hey Matt – got a quick one for you – i followed your before/after video and did the same thing – BUT – when i saved the editing in PS it asked me where to save it and then when i quit and went back to LR it wasn’t added to the library.

Hi Matt
My Mac seams to toggle between the zoom views just using the space bar. If this is not standard it may be something I’ve set by accident, I’ll have a dig over the weekend and try and find the reason ‘cos this would be a great short-cut for everyone.

When I want to zoom in by using Ctrl/Cmd +/ -, I found that only the +/- on my top keyboard row work for me. The +/- found next to my numeric keypad do not zoom in/out. Is this normal? I use the Ctrl/Cmd plue the numeric keypad +/- in Photoshop, but it won’t work in Lightroom.